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The Rock Art of Djulirri
“In a remote corner of Arnhem Land in central northern Australia, the Aborigines left paintings chronicling 15,000 years of their history. One site in particular, Djulirri … contains thousands of individual paintings in 20 discernable layers. In this video series [total ~15 mins], Paul S. C. Taçon, an archaeologist, cultural anthropologist, and rock art expert from Griffith University in Queensland, takes ARCHAEOLOGY on a tour of some of the most interesting and unusual paintings—depicting everything from cruise ships to dugong hunts to arrogant Europeans—from Djulirri’s encyclopedic central panel.” [—Samir S. Patel, senior editor, ARCHAEOLOGY.]
No comments on The Rock Art of Djulirri
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3 Quarks Daily 2011 Arts & Literature Prize
I am delighted. I wish more of my Monday mornings began like this. 🙂Yours truly has won the 3 Quarks Daily 2011 Arts & Literature Prize, which includes $1000.
I would like to thank the editors of 3QD for hosting this contest and for running an amazing site that has certainly turned me into an addict. It never ceases to amaze me how they can find such high quality content day after day. No wonder 3QD has attracted such a smart audience. Thanks also to Laila Lalami for judging the final round of the contest. If you have not visited her beautiful website, please do so now. While there, check out a video of her talk and book reading at Google. Here is what she said about my review.
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The Secret Lives of Ants
Ant colonies have long fascinated humans, not the least due to their parallels with human societies: millions of individuals with no central control, spanning many lifetimes and a large territory, yet able to solve complex problems through cooperation and division of labor. How do they do it? I attended a lecture by Deborah Gordon, a biologist at Stanford, on her decades-long research on ants. Later I found out that this TED talk she did on the same topic is remarkably close to the lecture she delivered. Enjoy!
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Who is an Asshole?
I recently attended a lecture at Stanford CASBS by philosopher Aaron James in which he ably demonstrated the philosophical method by applying it to the following pressing question: what is it for someone to be an asshole?James began with a working definition of an asshole, its differences with definitions of other related but distinct personality types (like jerk, bully), exemplars, nature of one’s experience with an asshole, some necessary but not sufficient characteristics, cross-cultural and gender specific variations (he proposed that nearly all assholes are men), whether assholes are born or made (if the former, are they responsible for their condition?), their impact on society, how to deal with them, and even whether it is possible to love an asshole. I didn’t agree with him on every front but I was impressed with his overall approach to the question.
The talk is hard for me to summarize and the questions from the audience were fascinating. But James is writing a book on the topic, so wait for it! I will provide below only his working definition of an asshole (from a handout) and some of the exemplars he proposed (feel free to add your own exemplars!). The second major bullet is the first bullet broken down into sub-components.
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Status Anxiety
Last night I saw Status Anxiety, an intelligent and entertaining two-hour British documentary (2004) written by Swiss author Alain de Botton. It looks at our ideas of success and failure, the anxiety we feel over our careers, the envy our peers evoke in us, and why it’s harder now to feel calm than ever before. Is success always earned? Is failure? What role does snobbery and envy play in our lives? What is the flip side of equality, individualism, and meritocracy? Where do our goals and ambitions really come from? And finally, how to get beyond all this. It’s based on the book by Botton with the same name, Status Anxiety. If you only have time for a condensed TED talk, see it here.
Categories: Art & Cinema, Books & Authors, Culture, Economics, Humor, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, Video -
3QD Arts & Literature Prize
Dear friends,The voting round for the 2011 Art & Literature Prize at 3 Quarks Daily is now open.
Browse the alphabetical list of all 69 entries here. My review of Joothan: A Dalit’s Life is in the running (#4 on the list).
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An Arab Bearing Gifts?
Here are two interesting articles about Steve Jobs. The first introduces his biological father who is from Syria, and the circumstances that led his biological parents to put him up for adoption in the U.S. (via 3QD).
Steve Jobs, arguably the most influential CEO in the world, is the biological son of an Arab American who was born in Homs, Syria, and studied [in] Beirut. … Abdul Fattah “John” Jandali emigrated to the United States in the early 1950s to pursue his university studies. Most media outlets have published little about Jandali, other than to say he was an outstanding professor of political science, that he married his girlfriend (Steve’s mother) and by whom he also had a daughter, and that he slipped from view following his separation from his wife … The 79-year-old Jandali has deliberately kept his distance from the media [until now].The second is a view into the mind of the amazing inventor he later became. It comes from an ex-colleague and the former CEO of Apple, John Sculley. Below is a random excerpt:
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Is There Such a Thing Called “Religion”?
It frequently amazes me that so many people are able to debate the pros and cons of “religion” without ever defining what they mean by the term. What exactly is this thing called “religion”? Is there a meaningful cluster of concepts that can delineate it, allow us to talk about it as a stable-enough category of human behavior, and study it as a scholarly discipline using the best methods of science and reason? This is not a mere academic question. I, for instance, come from a land with a bewildering array of beliefs and practices that can pass off as “religion”, where there is no need to even believe in God or spirits to be religious. Indeed, what do we talk about when we talk about “religion”?
In this thoughtful essay, anthropologist Pascal Boyer, author of Religion Explained, argues that as an observable phenomenon, “religion, like aether and phlogiston, belongs in the ash-heap of scientific history”. Empirical studies of “religion” eventually boil down to studying “genuine natural kinds, like costly signaling, counter-intuitive concepts, monopolistic specialists guilds, coalitional psychology, imagined agents, etc.” which are “found in many other contexts of human communication, and [are] often not found in “religion””.
I do not know if many scholars of religion still believe in gods or spirits, but I know that a great many of them believe in the existence of religion itself – that is, believe that the term “religion” is a useful category, that there is such a thing as religion out there in the world, that the project of “explaining religion” is a valid scientific project. Naturally, many of the scholars in question will also say that religion is a many splendored thing, that there are vast differences among the varieties of religious belief and behavior. Yet they assume that, underlying the diversity, there is enough of a common set of phenomena that a “theory of religion” is needed if not already available. -
S. Anand on Dalit Literature
In The Caravan, S. Anand provides an overview of modern Dalit literature, as well as insights into the portrayal of Dalits by many famous non-Dalit writers like Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, and Rohinton Mistry. While often sympathetic, he notes, these portrayals also tend to be unidimensional, where “Dalit characters lack distinct subjecthood prior to their involvement with high-caste characters.” Anand is co-founder of Navayana, “India’s first and only publishing house to exclusively focus on the issue of caste from anticaste perspective.”
The journey of modern Dalit literature has been a difficult one. But even though it has not necessarily enjoyed the support of numbers (in what has come to be the trade publishing market) we must engage with what Dalits are writing—not simply for reasons of authenticity, or as a concession to identity politics, but simply because of the aesthetic value of this body of writing, and for the insights it offers into the human condition. In a society that is still largely unwilling to recognise Dalits as equal, rights-bearing human beings, in a society that is inherently indifferent to the everyday violence against Dalits and their near-total ghettoisation in various spheres of social and cultural activity, in a society unwilling to share social and cultural resources equitably with Dalits unless mandated by law (as seen in the anti-reservation discourse), Dalit literature has the potential to humanise non-Dalits and sensitise them to a world into which they have no insight. But before we can understand what Dalit literature is seeking to accomplish, we need first to come to terms with the stranglehold of non-Dalit representations of Dalits.
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Arab Poetry of Resistance
In the video below (via Vijay Prashad on facebook), Sudhanva Deshpande recites a few poems of resistance from the great poets of the Arab world, including Palestine and “the Middle-East at a time when the region is going through one of the most historic revolutions.” The poems, recited in Hindustani with scrolling English translations, include Ticket (Samih al-Qasim), Ek Diwaliye ki Report (Samih al-Qasim), Filistini Ladka (an extract by Safi Abdi), Poochtach (Mahmoud Darwish), and Dil-e-Mann, Musafir-e-Mann (Faiz Ahmed Faiz). FYI, this is also the centenary year of Faiz’s birth and Himal Southasian has a special issue on the man.
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Anu Ramdas on ‘dharmic expressions’
Anu Ramdas, who writes from a Dalit perspective, offers some food for thought on her blog, Time and Us.i recently read an academic paper which was laboring to make a point about UN recognizing caste as a race issue and trying to decipher the relation and difference between race and caste. this is what this picture made me write “caste is not a sibling of race, it is not even the parent, it is the God of all forms of discriminations.” just look at those women’s faces, there is no hate, there is only a supreme conviction of righteousness, such pure dharmic expressions. who needs conical masks and nooses, who needs to disguise hate that is so pure that it does not even require the face to contort into a negative expression.
More here.
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Plutocracy Now
Mother Jones has a report with eleven revealing charts on inequality in America and its trajectory in recent decades. It made be think of George Carlin’s remark on the American dream: “It’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
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A Word on Statistics
A poem by Wislawa Szymborska
(translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak)
________________________________________Out of every hundred people,
those who always know better:
fifty-two.Categories: Fiction & Poetry -
Deliberative Polling®
Last week I attended an insightful lecture by James Fishkin, hosted by Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS). Fishkin is best known for pioneering the promising concept of Deliberative Polling®—”a practice of public consultation that employs random samples of the citizenry to explore how opinions would change if they were more informed”. Some of its primary ideas are summarized below. Click on this link for more info and examples of the kind of shifts in opinion, sometimes dramatic, that occur when citizens take the time to become more informed. Imagine the benefits of this practice if it found favor as a means of incorporating the voice of the people in public decisionmaking (more reading and an excellent audio interview with Fishkin).The Problem
Citizens are often uninformed about key public issues. Conventional polls represent the public’s surface impressions of sound bites and headlines. The public, subject to what social scientists have called “rational ignorance,” has little reason to confront trade-offs or invest time and effort in acquiring information or coming to a considered judgment.The Process
Deliberative Polling® is an attempt to use television and public opinion research in a new and constructive way. A random, representative sample is first polled on the targeted issues. After this baseline poll, members of the sample are invited to gather at a single place for a weekend in order to discuss the issues. Carefully balanced briefing materials are sent to the participants and are also made publicly available. The participants engage in dialogue with competing experts and political leaders based on questions they develop in small group discussions with trained moderators. Parts of the weekend events are broadcast on television, either live or in taped and edited form. After the deliberations, the sample is again asked the original questions. The resulting changes in opinion represent the conclusions the public would reach, if people had opportunity to become more informed and more engaged by the issues. -
Subrahmanyam on Naipaul
I just finished reading a non-fiction work by Naipaul, A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling, and came across this interesting review in the LRB by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, professor of history at UCLA. It resonated with me enough to merit a place here:
Many people have strong opinions about this Trinidadian expatriate, including the reviewers and interviewers he regularly deals with. The dividing line is essentially political, a fact that might be disquieting for a creative writer. In this respect Naipaul is more like Solzhenitsyn than, say, Joyce, whose appeal can transcend (or confound) traditional political divides. In the case of Naipaul, those on the left, especially defenders of the ‘Third World’ and its hopes, from C.L.R. James and Edward Said to Michael Gilsenan, more or less uniformly find him and his attitudes troubling and sometimes bigoted. He is portrayed as a self-hater and Uncle Tom, a product of the sorts of complex that Frantz Fanon diagnosed. On the other side are the conservative writers – those who might see Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a major intellectual figure – who celebrate Naipaul as an original voice, a writer who provides a searing, politically incorrect indictment of all that is wrong in the modern world: Islam in its various manifestations, the grotesque dictatorships of Africa, the squalor and self-inflicted misery of much of the Third World, the failure everywhere of projects of métissage between the West and non-West. A few fence-sitters meanwhile play down the significance of his non-fiction and praise his fiction, his pared-down style and capacity to write precise, economical, somewhat repetitive English … The five essays in this volume mostly revisit earlier moments in Naipaul’s work.More here. Here is another review in the NYT by David Reiff.
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Enfield on How Language Shapes Thought
On the Culture and Cognition blog, Nick Enfield‘s absorbing review of a book by Guy Deutscher: Through the Language Glass – Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. It also provides a good overview of the work of numerous scholars who have tackled the question of how language shapes thought. Enfield is a professor of Ethnolinguistics and is affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
[The preceding text] suggests a prima facie argument for a form of cultural relativity grounded in differences between languages. Given that concepts provide a basis for categorization and decision-making, and given that different languages supply their speakers with different concepts, then different languages provide their speakers with different bases for decision-making, and, subsequently, different patterns of behaviour. It’s a captivating possibility. We are members of a single species, but could it be that the different linguistic systems we inherit from different cultural histories cause us to think and act in fundamentally different ways? Or that as bilinguals, when we switch languages, we switch cognitive personalities? This is what linguistic relativity suggests….A version of relativity more likely to succeed begins with the observation that we cannot determine facts independently from the measuring instruments that are used. In life, our measuring instruments are our bodies. Why can dogs hear sounds we can’t? Because dogs have different bodies from us. For humans with human ears, those ultrasonic noises may as well not be real (though we are able to infer their existence using other means, from hi tech instruments like spectrograms to low tech measures like naked-eye observations of dogs’ behaviour). The body defines an individual’s horizons, both limiting and licensing our possible perceptions and actions. If you have the body of a bat, a pitch-dark cave will seem like a good place to be. But with the body of an earthworm, you will feel at home in a stretch of turf. If these are not different worlds they are certainly different worldviews.
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Decolonizing My Mind
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments. NB: an updated version of this essay is here.)
On English in India and the Linguistic Hierarchies of Colonized Minds
The modern era of European colonialism began in the Americas with bands of adventurers seeking El Dorado. Their early intrusions evolved into predatory monopolies like the East India Company and European states exerting direct control over the economic and political life of the colonies. The natives tended to not welcome and cooperate with the intruders, so alongside came great developments in the art of subjugating the natives, through military, political, and cultural means. In this essay, I’ll look at some cultural means of controlling the natives, particularly through language, and its effect on the psyche of the colonized, using examples from Africa and India. -
Ramadan and Zizek on Egypt
Must see. “The revolutionary chants on the streets of Egypt have resonated around the world, but with a popular uprising without a clear direction and an unpopular leader refusing to concede, Egypt’s future hangs in the balance. Riz Khan talks to Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek about the power of popular dissent, the limits of peaceful protest and the future of Egyptian politics.”
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Human Planet
Look out for Human Planet from the BBC, “an awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping, heart-stopping landmark series that marvels at mankind’s incredible relationship with nature in the world today. Uniquely in the animal kingdom, humans have managed to adapt and thrive in every environment on Earth. Each episode takes you to the extremes of our planet: the arctic, mountains, oceans, jungles, grasslands, deserts, rivers and even the urban jungle. Here you will meet people who survive by building complex, exciting and often mutually beneficial relationships with their animal neighbours and the hostile elements of the natural world.” YouTube has many clips from the series.
The series began airing earlier this month in the UK and will have an international release later this year.
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On Bal vs. Dalrymple
Every so often, a war of the words breaks out between two literary types. Onlookers, or should I say onliners, gather around to cheer, deride, or simply watch the tamasha with wonder and amusement. Many such exchanges have happened on the pages of Outlook India. A new one has just unfolded in Open Magazine between Hartosh Singh Bal, its political editor (and 3QD columnist), and William Dalrymple, UK author.The Literary Raj — the opening salvo by Hartosh Singh Bal
The piece you ran is blatantly racist — rejoinder by William Dalrymple
